Content area
Full Text
Greg Campbell. Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World's Most Precious Stones. New York: Westview Press, 2002. 288 pp. $26.00. Cloth. $15.95. Paper.
Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World's Most Precious Stones is journalist Greg Campbell's first-hand account of diamond mining, selling, and retailing from the mines of Sierra Leone to the cutting and polishing shops of Belgium to the retail markets of New York and London. Based on several trips Campbell made to Sierra Leone during 2001, the book chronicles many human rights atrocities associated with diamond mining and trading, much of which is illegally controlled by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). Campbell notes that in the early 1990s the RUF began as a peasant's rebellion led by Foday Sankoh, a Libyan-trained and Liberian-backed corporal in the Sierra Leone Army. However, shortly after the RUF invaded Sierra Leone from neighboring Liberia, it embarked on campaigns of brutality, killing and maiming soldiers and civilians alike in order to gain control of the diamond mines, which produce some of the best quality gemstones in the world.
Campbell begins the book with an...